Waiting Impatiently
by Cherry Blossom
Summary: After the war, Heero disappeared, leaving an angry Duo behind. Now, two years later, Duo receives a late night phonecall...


Warnings: shounen ai content, 1x2 pairing.

Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing. 

Notes: Loosely based on Ani Difranco's song "the Diner". If you get the chance to listen to the song, I recommend the entire living in clip cd. Ani is da bomb ^_^

Waiting Impatiently

"I think you're the least fucked up person I've ever met

and that may be as close to the real thing as I'm ever gonna get…"

-Ani Difranco (The Diner)

The man shifted impatiently, looking down once more at the watch on his wrist and squinting at the numbers in the dimmed light of the hallway. He had been waiting to use the phone for at least ten minutes now and the guy in front of him didn't seem to be going anywhere quickly. The man shifted again and sighed. He wouldn't have minded the wait so much if the guy in front had actually been engaging in a conversation of some sort, but no, he was just standing there in front of the pay phone, a quarter clutched in his hand and a massive frown on his face.

It was the frown that had stopped him from just pushing the guy aside and making his call. Something about that face warned him that antagonizing this person without good reason would lead to unpleasant happenings. 

__

'He's not even very big. Muscular, sure, but he's small and thin. He's young too. I could take him easy…' 

The man made a quick decision.

"Er…excuse me…"

Cold blue eyes snapped into focus on his face and the man immediately felt like a bug pinned to a board with the words "dead meat" inscribed beneath him. Those eyes were not the eyes of a boy. They were the eyes of a predator spotting a small, wounded animal waiting to be pounced on. 

"What do you want?"

The man had to swallow before he could answer.

"Uh…I was just wondering how long you were going to be at the phone, 'cause I kind of have to make a call—" the eyes narrowed dangerously "—but I can just…go and use the phone at the gas station across the street! Yeah, sure. That's what I'll do. You just…keep on with what you're doing and I'll go across the street, okay?"

The man backed away from the phone and scurried out of the hallway as quickly as possible without running, leaving the young man behind to frown once more at the pay phone and the quarter in his hand. The young man took a deep breath and took the phone from its cradle, pushing the quarter into the slot and then crossing his fingers.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Duo was in the middle of a dream when he heard the ringing. At first he tried to ignore it but when the annoying sound became too much for him to bear he reached a sleep-numbed hand out to slap at the alarm clock on his bedside-table. Unfortunately, this did nothing at all to stop the sound. Duo frowned in his sleep and took another whack at the clock. This time it fell off the table and crashed noisily to the floor. The ringing continued.

__

'Shit,' Duo thought. _''m gonna have ta wake up.'_

Duo sighed and then opened two bleary violet eyes, staring at the ceiling until he adjusted to the lack of light in the room. He noticed two things. One was that the alarm clock on the floor was displaying "2:30 am" in big neon green numbers. The other was that it wasn't the alarm clock that was ringing so annoyingly. It was the phone.

"Who the hell would be calling me this la—"

Duo's muttering halted as visions of Hilde in a car accident or Quatre in a hospital bed assaulted his mind. He scrambled to pick up the phone, tripping over the beside-table and banging his hip on the dresser in the process.

__

'Damn. That's going to leave a bruise,' some part of his mind catalogued while the rest of him went into panic mode.

"Hello?" he squeaked, gripping the receiver in a white knuckled grip.

"Duo?"

The braided pilot froze, almost dropping the phone in his astonishment. Out of all the people in the world who could be calling, this was the last person he would have expected. He opened his mouth to speak, faltered, then swallowed and tried again.

"H-Heero?"

Silence echoed in his ears for such a long pause that Duo began to think that he had dreamed the voice in the first place. It wouldn't have been the first time…

"Look, if this is some kind of joke—"

"It's me Duo. I'm back."

Duo found himself at a loss for words. He had waited for this moment for so long now he had resigned himself to the fact that it was never going to happen. And yet here he was, talking to Heero on the phone, at…two in the morning…

"Are you…are you okay? I mean, you're not hurt or anything, are you?" Duo asked, picturing things like bullet holes or knife wounds to the gut marking his former lover's golden skin. Why else would Heero be calling him this late at night?

"I'm fine."

"Oh…well, that's good." Duo bit his lip, trying to think of a reason why Heero would be calling him, out of the blue, at two in the morning, after disappearing for two years. Eventually he gave up and decided to ask the inevitable question.

"So was there something you wanted to tell me?"

"Your coffee is getting cold."

Duo didn't even attempt to wrap his mind around this cryptic comment.

"Huh?"

"I'm at Patsy's Diner at Sixth and Carlton. You'd better get down here fast or your coffee will get cold."

Duo sputtered helplessly for a few seconds before exclaiming, "Do you even _know_ what time it is?!"

"It's two thirty-six am, Friday, the sixteenth of February, after colony one nine eight," the voice replied, in perfect monotone.

A hint of anger entered Duo's voice. "And you think that I'm going to just trot right out in the middle of the night to have coffee with the guy who left me _without saying goodbye_ for two fucking years without as much as a postcard or note saying you were even _alive_? God, Heero!"

There was silence on the other end of the line and then…

"I'll wait at the diner for you until three am. If you don't come then I'll understand, and I won't contact you again. But Duo…I really do want to see you."

There was an abrupt click as Heero disconnected. Duo held the phone to his ear a few seconds longer, listening to the dial tone echo in his ears. Then he placed the phone carefully back into its cradle.

"Well, how about that," he announced to the empty room. "He really _wants_ to see me." 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Heero watched the steam rise from the two untouched cups of coffee in front of him and tried to dismiss the sinking feeling in his stomach. He checked his watch again.

__

'2:58…Duo still has two minutes. He could still make it.'

Heero glared at the glass door of the diner, as if willing it to open and a familiar braided figure to step inside, but the door was being particularly uncooperative in this endeavor. Heero sighed and cupped his hands around on of the mugs of coffee, as if trying to keep the quickly escaping heat inside. A tired looking waitress came by and asked if he wanted the mugs warmed up again. Heero glanced at his watch in time to see the 'eight' turn into a 'nine' and shook his head.

Blinking the stinging moisture from his eyes, Heero tossed some bills on the table and got up from his chair. Just as he was turning towards the door, a familiar voice called out to him.

"Heero!"

The Japanese pilot watched as Duo strode into the Diner, clothes rumpled on his body, ratty looking jacket unzipped over jeans and a T-shirt, and a wet braid dripping water over his shoulder to puddle on the floor. He had grown a few inches taller since Heero had last seen him, his form filled out a bit so that he didn't look like a scarecrow anymore, although he was still thin for his age. But other then that he looked the same: same braid, some violet eyes, same smooth creamy skin. Heero resisted the urge to touch the other man with difficulty, knowing that it would be too soon to initiate such contact. Maybe it was more then too soon. Maybe it was too late.

__

'God I hope not.'

"What are you leaving for, I have one more minute right? Geez, you could have given me a bit more time to get dressed. You know how long it takes to wash my hair," Duo complained, giving said hair a vicious twist, causing even more water to drip on the floor. The waitress gave him a dirty look, which Duo ignored magnificently.

"You came," Heero stated, relief obvious in his voice.

"Yeah well…only because I was worried about you. I mean, you _said_ you were fine, but you would say that if you had two bullet wounds, a concussion, and pneumonia so…_are_ you okay?"

Heero nodded and Duo peered at him in the dim lighting, his gaze focusing on the bags under his former lover's eyes and the somewhat haggard appearance. 

"You don't look fine," he muttered.

"I…haven't been sleeping lately," Heero confessed.

"Really? Do you know why?"

The Japanese boy licked his lips and avoided Duo's gaze, looking back towards the table. "Can we sit down first?" he said, gesturing to the cups of coffee that were, by now, probably stone cold.

"Sure," Duo said, not liking the way Heero was swaying unsteadily on his feet. It would have to take an awful lot of sleep deprivation to affect the Wing pilot so visibly. During the war, Duo could remember Heero going weeks with only the barest minimum of sleep and still managing to look bright eyed and bushy tailed…well, maybe not bushy-tailed. Certainly more alert then Duo could manage to be in the morning.

"So…" Duo started, as he took his seat and grabbed onto the coffee mug in front of him. He looked at the contents of the mug dubiously, swirling it around as if that would make the mixture look more appetizing.

"You want me to warm that up for you, honey?" asked the waitress, who had suddenly materialized at Duo's shoulder. Duo looked as if he were going to protest the "honey" part of her sentence but before he could muster up enough energy to do so, Heero had already handed her the coffee mugs and dismissed her with a nod of his head.

After the waitress had ducked back behind the counter, Heero and Duo sat staring at each other, neither one quite knowing how to start the conversation. The deeper the silence became, the more miserable Heero looked, but Duo wasn't about to offer up any help.

__

'The guy takes off for two years and then shows up again out of the blue, he can damn well take the first step,' Duo thought to himself, wishing he had the mug of coffee back, just to have somewhere to look other then into those intense blue eyes that were watching him carefully from across the table.

Finally, the waitress brought the coffee back, steaming, black and looking like the same sludge every twenty-four hour diner serves after midnight. 

__

'Could probably peel paint off of walls,' Duo thought, taking a cautious sip. He waited.

"I…didn't think you'd want to see me again," Heero started. "I thought for a minute that you wouldn't come."

Duo shrugged, not bothering to conceal the anger in his eyes. "Yeah well, for a minute there I considered standing you up. I've cursed your name plenty of times in the past two years, Yuy. The way you left me didn't exactly leave a great impression."

Heero winced at the use of his last name. Duo only used that when he was particularly pissed off.

"I know I could have done that better—"

"Better? Better?! You left without a single word, Yuy. You didn't even _tell_ me you were going. No 'sorry Duo, but I'm breaking up with you,' no 'let's just be friends, okay,' no nothing. Not even a bloody goodbye! Do you _know_ how much that hurt? I spent the first week and a half thinking you just had a job somewhere and forgot to tell me. I spent the _next_ two months thinking you just got spooked and would come back eventually. I called everyone I knew and _nobody_ could find you. God Heero, I spent the last couple months thinking you were DEAD!"

On the last word, Duo slammed his coffee mug onto the table causing the hot liquid to spill over the side and burn his fingers. He didn't seem to notice.

If Heero had looked miserable before, he looked absolutely wretched now. His shoulders had drooped a bit more at every word from the braided boy's mouth. Duo saw the slight tremble in his hands and took pity on the boy.

"So," he sighed, "where were you all this time?"

"I traveled a lot," Heero replied. "I never stayed in one place too long. Most of the time I just wandered wherever seemed most convenient. I went back to L1 for a while but I couldn't settle there. It was too…strange."

"Why did you leave in the first place? No…scratch that, I don't wanna know that right now. What I really want to know is, why did you come back? Why now?"

"It was too quiet."

Duo's face twisted in confusion. "Huh?"

Heero seemed to fold in on himself, his voice growing softer. "It was too quiet without you. I…after the war I tried to adjust to not being a soldier anymore. I tried to fit in but it wasn't working. You saw how I was."

"You were doing okay. We could have worked on it together you know," Duo said, his voice full of reproach.

"No," Heero shook his head. "It wasn't okay. I could…function with you around, but only barely. You made allowances for me, because you understood, but we both know that it wouldn't have worked if I was alone."

"But you didn't have to do it alone," Duo said. "That was the entire point."

"I didn't want to be dependent on you. Not like that. Eventually we both would have gone mad. You _know_ that, Duo," Heero pleaded.

"Maybe. But you still didn't have to leave that way."

"I know. I'm…sorry."

"You're sorry?!" Duo's mocking tone cut deep. "Well what do you know, I'm sorry too. Why'd you come back Heero? If being with me was so _debilitating_ for you, why'd you come back?"

Heero took a deep breath and forced himself to look Duo in the eye. He owed him that much.

"It was quiet without you. At first I didn't notice. I was too concerned with running, getting away from this life. I knew I was lonely but I thought that would go away eventually. When it didn't I began noticing the silence. First it was just…little things like conversation. I used to buy bags and bags of audiotapes, just so I could listen to someone talking. I didn't like turning on the television. Sometimes they would show pictures of you and the other pilots on the news and I didn't want to be reminded…

"Eventually I noticed other things, other absences of sound, like you brushing your hair in the morning or the shower running for hours until all the hot water is gone. I kept waking up in the night expecting you to steal the covers but you were never there. During the last couple of weeks I haven't slept at all. I kept lying awake trying to hear the sound of you breathing."

"So what you're saying is, you missed me?" Duo asked, flatly.

"Yes."

Duo's shoulders slumped and he raised a hand to his forehead, rubbing softly at his eyes. "And you think this makes up for it? That you can just come back like nothing happened, that you weren't just gone for two years with no explanation? You think you can just come back into my life? Just like that?"

"Duo I—"

"I know. You're sorry, right?"

"I love you."

"WHAT?!" All the colour drained from Duo's face and Heero would have reached out to give him a reassuring touch but he didn't dare. He didn't have the right to assume he was welcome to touch. Not anymore.

"I love you. I couldn't be sure…before…if I was just latching onto you because you were the first safe thing, the first stable person in my life to care for me. But after I left and I couldn't forget you, I knew what I felt was real."

Duo's eyes sparkled suspiciously and his voice held a bit of a tremor as he asked, "What do you want me to do with this information, Heero? What am I supposed to do with this, huh?"

"You don't have to do anything. I know I hurt you by leaving. If you don't want to see me anymore I'll understand. But I wanted you to know…I wanted to be sure you knew how I feel…"

Duo sighed and then pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. Heero started at the sound of floorboard scratching and turned his eyes fearfully to Duo's face.

"Where are you going?" he asked, half-dreading the answer.

"Home," Duo said shortly, taking up his jacket.

Heero's eyes closed and he had to take a few shaky breaths to keep from crying. It had been too late. Duo didn't want him, didn't need him anymore. He had waited too long. _'I'm not going to beg him to stay. It's Duo's choice and he made it.'_

When he opened his eyes, Heero expected to see the tail end of a braid sweeping out the door. Instead he found himself looking at an outstretched palm before his face. He looked up into a pair of smiling violet eyes.

"Well," Duo said, a touch of impatience in his voice. "Are you coming?"

Heero lips curved into a genuine smile as he took Duo's hand in his own. The small touch was warm and familiar and Heero couldn't keep himself from using the grip to launch himself into the other man's arms, burying his nose in that familiar scent and breathing deeply. Duo held on tightly, ignoring the curious gaze of the waitress. He patted Heero soothingly on the back and whispered in his ear, "I love you too, asshole."

They stayed in the embrace a few moments longer before pulling away, although Duo still kept a tight grip on Heero's hand. "Let's go home, ne?" he said, and the Japanese boy nodded in reply.

They left the diner together and walked out into the early dampness of the dawn, fingers interlaced and faces turned towards the horizon where the sun was just beginning to peek over the city traffic. 

Fin.


End file.
